Time was, kids could learn how the U.S. Congress makes laws by watching Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday mornings. Sing along if you know it: “I’m just a bill, just an ordinary bill, and I started out on Capitol Hill…”
But Schoolhouse Rock is gone. So are the civics and American government classes that were once required to graduate high school. And when Memphis-based mentor Tony Nichelson asks a teenager about the Bill of Rights today, he often gets a blank look in return.
“Do they know the three branches of government?” he said. “Do they know how many representatives there are? It’s dangerous for us to have young people that have no clue about some very basic things about America.”
The gap left behind is more than nostalgic. In an era when young people are navigating aggressive federal enforcement, expanding executive power and communities where a knock on the door can upend a family, understanding your rights isn’t a civics elective. It’s a survival skill.
Which is exactly why Nichelson — Memphis mentor, founder of Man of the House Mentoring and CEO of SouthSoul Media — launched “Civic Literacy / Teen Project ’26,” a structured initiative designed to give young people in the Bluff City what their schools stopped providing long ago.
“I remember learning all of the state capitals. It gave me a sense of how big the nation was,” Nichelson said. “I don’t know when it happened or how it happened, but we got away from it.”
How Civics got crowded out of school
Nichelson’s concern tracks a documented shift in American education that played out over decades.
Civics was once a standard feature of the high school curriculum — a standalone course, required, alongside U.S. history and geography. Students memorized the branches of government, learned how laws were made and could locate the states on a map. It wasn’t glamorous instruction, but it was foundational.
The drift started in the 1970s, when schools began folding civics into broader “social studies” frameworks. Then in 1983, a federal report called “A Nation at Risk” sounded the alarm about American students falling behind — and the response was to double down on math, science and reading. Civics didn’t disappear, but it started losing ground.
The decisive blow came in the early 2000s with No Child Left Behind. Under that law, schools were evaluated almost entirely on reading and math scores. Subjects that weren’t federally tested — civics, history, geography — got squeezed to the margins. Educators will tell you that’s when it really slipped away.
Tennessee still requires a government course for graduation — half a credit — and since 2017 has mandated a civics test based on the U.S. citizenship exam. On paper, the knowledge requirement went up. In practice, the depth never came with it.
That’s the distinction Nichelson keeps returning to. Civics didn’t vanish from the classroom. It just got crowded out — and what replaced it was awareness without understanding, exposure without application. And in a nation with a documented history of re-writing laws specifically to restrict and often capture people of color, ignorance of the law can land you in jail.
What used to be passed down
For Black families in the South, the stakes of civic ignorance were never abstract. A father could be pulled from his household over a misdemeanor, not because the system misfired, but because it was working exactly as designed, against people who didn’t know how to push back.
“You had to know what the law stated. And there were laws written to really damage, in my opinion, the families and communities,” he said. “You could snatch a father away from his family because of some misdemeanor law and put him on a chain gang.
“You could go to jail for things that you did not know. You had to know the law so you wouldn’t get picked up for vagrancy,” he said. “Parents knew it, and they taught their children that.”
That knowledge moved through Black households the way other families passed down recipes or trades. It was a survival curriculum. And it carried a second lesson alongside the first — that people who understood the system well enough could also organize to change it.
What the Civil Rights Movement actually taught
One of Nichelson’s sharper points is about what gets remembered versus what actually happened during the Civil Rights era.
The images people carry — fire hoses in Birmingham, the march on Selma — are real. But they don’t tell the whole story of how change was made. Behind every iconic moment was infrastructure. Organization. People who understood the system well enough to know exactly where to push.
Take the Montgomery Bus Boycott. What’s often remembered as a moment of spontaneous resistance was something far more deliberate. “They had carpools,” Nichelson said. “Over 300; and some days, they crippled that bus line. The government had to respond.”
King was 26 years old when he arrived in Montgomery. The people who changed America weren’t distant historical figures — they were young, organized and operating from a clear understanding of their rights and the system they were up against. That’s not a footnote. That’s the lesson.
“The community came together,” Nichelson said. “Churches, neighborhoods — everybody said, ‘We have to do this.’”
That model of organized, legally grounded activism is what he’s trying to revive — and pass on.
What he’s building
Teen Project ’26 started in April and runs to July 4 at City University School of Liberal Arts, targeting students ages 12 to 17. At its center is a student workbook built around the Bill of Rights, key constitutional amendments and an exploration of civil rights history — not as distant events, but as living context.
The program runs on three tracks: academic, economic and citizenship. Students don’t just study history — they respond to it. They write essays, create artwork, produce podcasts and public service announcements. The best work can be published, licensed, even monetized.
“Now is your time to publish, share and monetize your God-given craft,” the program materials tell students.
That’s not just motivation. For Nichelson, it’s the whole argument — that young people have something worth saying about this moment, and that the tools to say it effectively start with understanding how the country works.
“There are some really talented and bright young people,” he said, “but they don’t get the opportunity. (Our community isn’t) connecting with students who have this kind of talent for art and writing to keep this information alive among their peers.”
Why 2026 is the moment
The nation’s 250th anniversary is already generating celebration, spectacle and, in some quarters, real anxiety about which stories will be told and how.
Nichelson doesn’t sidestep that tension. “It’s going to be an interesting time,” he said. “America has to face the fact that, yeah, we’re a great nation and have done a lot of things — but there’s a downside, there’s a dark side.”
His program’s guiding principle speaks directly to that: America’s 250 is our history as well.
“Everything you can think of for that 250 years,” he said, “there was some aspect of Black life that was affected. Slavery, Jim Crow, busing — even to this very day. That’s why that slogan sticks in my mind.”
His goal isn’t to diminish the celebration. It’s to make sure young people show up to it informed — and prepared to shape how the story gets told from here.
An open invitation
The program is still recruiting students. Nichelson said he’s working to connect a few current participants — including a student named Lorraine — with TSD for follow-up conversations in the coming weeks.
For now, he’s focused on starting where he has to.
“We have to start with smaller bites,” he said. “Knowing our Bill of Rights. Young people want to know more about this. We just haven’t done a good job of connecting it.”
That gap — between what young people want to know and what they’re actually being taught — is, for Nichelson, the whole story. And at 250 years in, he believes America is running out of time to close it.
For more information on Civic Literacy / Teen Project ’26, contact Tony Nichelson at shopouryouth@gmail.com or makingblackboys@gmail.com, or call 901.336.2399.
